• Meditation :
¯¯One foot in front of the other.

Going through boxes, stuff packed for decades in some instances. Moving day is nearing.


Anyway, came across two loose items ("loose", as in not a part of a chronological notebook of colle[ c ]ted works) which are also undated. Saw them —dug into that particular box at all, in fact— only because I "felt" a kind of "need" for an answer to a particular question, one that I suddenly recalled I had written down the answer I'd found for it, myself, a long time ago. Realized I was —at this moment, with my move and all— poised to offer to that person (or persons?) what I'd found, if I could locate that piece. Best of intentions, wouldn't you say?


It astonishes even me what (my eyeballs register) is in these cartons, and I'm the one put it all there. Some of this stuff has been lying untouched from the beginning, as the years added depth to that carton's pile til full when a new box was begun.


So, it's clear to me (now, at any rate) I am probably not going to find that piece I sought a few moments ago. Not if I plan to do anything else at all across the next couple of weeks. Like Move.


So I decided to share, here, these two I mentioned. They don't "answer" anything asked (at least that I overheard), and I don't consider them among my "best" or anything like that. But they were found almost right away, and are truly unusual/hen's-tooth-rare in that they were stored away undated. So here they are [above this entry]. Enjoy :o)





____________
Author's Journal Note :


The two SPR pieces from which this TCB blog entry's title derives are praise and Whatever . [See footnote 1.] The night described was the first time since 1999 and, as it turned out, the last that I examined the contents of one very specific carton which, until the date of this TCB blog entry, had —along with all the other boxes containing my writings— been inaccessible since my previous move seven years earlier.


The container in question is the same one that famously vanished after movers allegedly and erroneously loaded it onto their moving van on 30 June 2006 [while both I and my son were assisting elsewhere in a tiny cottage with the square footage of a modest one-bedroom apartment. There is no other circumstance under which this could have occurred]. Or else —take your pick— during that loading, the box dematerialized from its position abutting two others containing nothing but SPR writings. [Which do you think the more likely explanation? All such cartons had been labeled and set aside awaiting personal handling after the professionals had finished loading. None of the other cartons in that special designated space were moved an inch.]


The missing box contained a minimum of one decade's complete work through at least winter 1998-99 and, more than probably, a partial chunk of preceding years. The sub-epoch I describe straddles black hole and In A Rib . Those very years began my most mature and spiritual writing, including many pieces [possibly, even, “mostly pieces”] that by theme belong in the collection _The Odyssey of the Peerless Idiot_. There exists a TCB blog entry [which, by the time you read this, may already be an SPR Ort] describing the baffling discovery, months later, of a single folder from the vanished carton, found under a bed purchased in a different city, that had been personally moved by its previous owner into its permanent position in my empty apartment, before anything else was brought here from the cottage. That folder contained a number of writings [ 2 ] from the sub-epoch indicated.

— Sugarpie Rabbit, 20 March 2007

FOOTNOTES :

1

I was subsequently able to date both of the “two pieces” which inspired this TCB blog entry, as follows:


I ran across mention of my one and only public reading of “praise”, then entitled “web”, which occurred within a day or so of my writing it for that very occasion. Then I recalled having written “Whatever” on a napkin while awaiting my dinner in a favorite restaurant —“transcribing” it is actually what occurred, for I did not “write” it at all— during a very unusual time in my life. That time spanned only a few months which, therefore, made dating that one equally certain.


2

The pieces which have survived the missing carton —combined with an inventoried total absence of additional writings from the suspect years— plus my insistent memory of having written during that time many, many more than the few I have subsequently located, collectively indicate that approximately one-third of my life's work was stored in the notebooks I saw in that carton the night this TCB blog entry was written and from which I selected its “two pieces”.